NetApp is suing Sun Microsystems over the ZFS file system technology (press release). It’s a software patent case, headed for East Texas. The problem? Sun released ZFS as open source, complicating the situation.

451 Storage Analyst Henry Baltazar and I spoke with Dave Hitz, founder and EVP of Network Appliance, briefly by phone today about the lawsuit and the implications for the open source community. Hitz is the named inventor on five of the Network Appliance patents at issue. He has posted an entry about the lawsuit on his blog - NetApp Sues Sun for ZFS Patent Infringement. Take a look. Hitz told me that this case is about NetApp and Sun, not the open source community that has …

MySQL follows ANSI SQL standard quite close. But there are a few points where it differs. To make MySQL follow the ANSI standard more closely you can use the SQL_MODE system system variable.

If you set the SQL mode to ANSI, MySQL will interpret you SQL commands differently. Some of your SELECT statements might work differently or not at all. But which ones? Let's see if you know....

Suppose you change your sql mode setting from none to ANSI. Which of the following statements will be affected:

a) SELECT concat(table_name,' ',column_name) FROM information_schema.COLUMNS
b) SELECT TABLE_NAME||' '||COLUMN_NAME FROM information_schema.COLUMNS
c) SELECT count (*) FROM information_schema.COLUMNS
d) SELECT "TABLE_NAME" FROM information_schema.COLUMNS
e) SELECT `TABLE_NAME` FROM information_schema.COLUMNS

This is the query that just got me to thinking that I should blog about mySQL hints, tips, and ramblings. So... thinking turned into action and now I have a blog! The next step is to be able to keep it going so that it becomes useful to mySQL database administrators that are concerned about performance of mySQL and also need make sure that queries are written well.

Now... onward and forward...

By Tim O'Reilly

Miguel de Icaza writes:

Today we are formalizing a collaboration between Microsoft and Novell with the explicit purpose of bringing Silverlight to Linux and do this in a fully supported way. The highlights of this collaboration include: ... Microsoft will give Novell access to the test suites for Silverlight to ensure that we have a compatible specification. The same test suite that Microsoft uses for Silverlight. Microsoft will give us access to the Silverlight specifications: details that might be necessary to implement 1.0, beyond what is currently published on the web; and specifications on the 1.1 version of Silverlight as it is updated. Microsoft will make the codecs for video and audio available to users of Moonlight from their web site. The codecs will be binary codecs, and they will only be licensed for use with Moonlight on a …

A short note to let everyone know that I’ll be heading to Dubai later today to participate in Pythian’s exhibit in the Business Solutions Hall. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, GITEX is like COMDEX for the Middle-East - it’s literally the third largest tradeshow in the world where COMDEX is #1 - [...]

I've been very busy since OSCON, so my blog pipeline is full. Hopefully I can properly catch up on some topics I've been meaning to discuss in the next few weeks. If you've been busy like me, you might be wondering how to catch up and keep up with the things that are most important to you. I've found that having my own planet (blog aggregator) has helped tremendously. If your tastes are similar (PHP, web application security, etc.), you might like mine, cleverly (yeah, right) dubbed Planet Chris. Other planets you might find interesting are Planet PHP, Planet Web Security, and Planet MySQL, although I highly recommend creating your own. I haven't …

MySQL Has API to run Multiple Queries at once. This feature was designed mainly with saving network round trip in mind and got a little traction due to associated security risks and not significant gains in most cases.

What would make MySQL Multiple Queries API more usable ?

Allow to run queries in parallel - The great benefit of knowning all queries at once is of course you can run them in parallel. Asynchrnous submission API would be even better but even multi query working this way would be much better. I know there is a work going on on breaking connection=thread=transaction mapping which may allow having multiple working threads for same transaction within same connection which could possibly allow to implement it.

Optimize query set The other thing you can do when you …

MuleSource launches MuleForge. Talend integrates with SugarCRM. Microsoft issues press release on Open XML standards vote. (and more)

MuleSource Launches MuleForge.org to Accelerate Universal Integration of Data and Services, MuleSource (Press Release)

Talend Announces Data Integration for SugarCRM, Talend (Press Release)

Strong Global Support for Open XML as It Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process, Microsoft (Press Release)

Virtual Iron Integrates SLES 10 Kernel and Drivers in Latest Release, …

If you’re new to MySQL, you might not know that in the default configuration ‘a’='A’. Ie, string comparisons are by default case-insensitive. If this is a surprise to you, read up on Chapter 9 of the online manual, on character sets and collations.

The default character set is latin1 and the default collation is latin1_swedish_ci (’ci’ stands for ‘case-insensitive). If you don’t want ‘a’ to equal ‘A’, you can change this by setting the variables ‘character-set-server’ and ‘collation-server’ in your config file or your startup options. For example, we want to support unicode, so we use character-set-server=’utf8′ in our config file. We also added the following (in the [mysqld] section) so that clients will use the right character set and collation, too: init_connect=’set names utf8; set collation_connection=utf8_bin’.

On the other hand, by default in linux, …

MySQL is not so heavily-instrumented as Oracle. (Back to tuning using ratios rather than the wait interface… sigh…) But it does offer (among other tools) the slow query log. Turn it on (put ‘log_slow_queries‘ in your config file), and all queries that take longer than long_query_time seconds (also set in your config file) will be logged to a slow query log file, along with the time they took to execute. Then you can use mysqldumpslow to analyze the output. You can see, for example, which slow queries are taking the most cumulative time on your server, or are being executed most frequently. (The manual doesn’t say much about it, and mysqldumpslow ––help doesn’t give too much help, but I think mysqldumpslow -s t and mysqldumpslow -s c do that.)

If you use InnoDB, though (as we do), be aware that the “lock time” logged in the slow query log only counts time for …